Blockchain in OTT Video Advertising: IAB Whitepaper

Released on Thursday, a new whitepaper by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) claims to uncover strong use cases for blockchain technology in digital video advertising. The paper, Blockchain for Video Advertising: A Market Snapshot of Publisher Buyer Use Cases, details new initiatives and insights — provided by companies like FreeWheel, Kochava, MetaX and NYIAX — on the advantages and challenges of using blockchain in digial video.

The report focuses on Over-the-Top (OTT) advertising, in particular, which refers to content accessed via the internet without the involvement of a television service provider. OTT includes Subscription Video-on-Demand (SVOD) services like Netflix, as well as, free ad-supported services like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime Video. The whitepaper outlines ways in which blockchain technology can reduce costs for advertisers and publishers while increasing efficiency and creating a more trustworthy supply chain.

Executive Vice President of Industry Initiatives at IAB, Anna Bager said, in a statement, “Blockchain seems to be the new ‘siren’s call’ in the business world—but there is no doubt that this technology holds tremendous promise for digital video advertising. This paper is a first of what we anticipate will be many reports from IAB exploring the future of blockchain in digital video. Tapping into our members’ pioneering work and insights from across the ecosystem, we plan to offer thought leadership, guidance, and inspiration that will steer the new course for digital video, OTT, and blockchain.”

The paper outlines the structure of blockchain technology and explores existing use cases in digital advertising, including: Blockgraph from FreeWheel; XCHNG from Kochava; Ads.txt Plus from MetaX and the New York Interactive Advertising Exchange (NYIAX). It also explores key advantages to using blockchain technology for OTT publisher inventory, including: lower queries per second than digital display advertising; relatively lower number of suppliers; generally transparent suppliers and existing peer to peer content delivery networks.

Challenges identified in the paper include: the existing demand for OTT ad sellers, disincentivizing a desire to change their existing models; the complex set of endpoint clients associated with OTT advertising and a lack of shared taxonomies and standards across the category.

Charles Manning, CEO of Kochava, who participated in the report, stated, “Blockchain presents the opportunity for us to approach the digital advertising landscape and its current challenges from an entirely different perspective. Our adaptation has required not only a recalibrating of our view on the ad buying process, but also the creation of a new protocol designed to address the needs of all the players in the ecosystem. With a focus on creating new transactional efficiencies, we see an opportunity to replace the standard paper-based agreements with a new form of IO, manifested between buyers and sellers through smart contracts. Through these and other innovations, we see a future for a next generation consensus model, supported by a protocol that will be able to handle millions of transactions per second. We look forward to working with IAB and others in this space to push blockchain beyond its current nascent state towards a more efficient, distributed and trusted way of doing business.”

Alex started his professional career in a data analyst role at a global electrical components distributor before transitioning to work in the blockchain industry full time in 2017. He has performed research and analysis on multiple projects including traditional securities and cryptocurrencies, and has contributed to operational design for cryptocurrency mining and other entrepreneurial projects since 2015. Alex graduated from Ithaca College in 2014 with a BS in Finance and a minor in Politics.